Government data offer unparalleled opportunities to distinguish your reporting with trend stories about what's happening in your local economy. Especially this year, with the release of the every-five-year Economic Census, journalists will have a unique opportunity to track changes in their local community from 2007 - before the recession- to 2012.

The key is to know where to look on often confusing government Websites and then how to analyze the data you find. Just in time for the International Year of Statistics, this free workshop will provide you with a road map to finding and delivering at least five local enterprise stories from the data collected by the Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Stop by the IRE sales table and take a look at our merchandise. We will be selling books, including the newest title in the IRE beat book series. The large selection of titles we carry will certainly include your interests. The winners of the IRE T-shirt contest will be displayed and on sale. The sales table is also the place to get your ticket to "A Night on the Town" an event that is sure to be a fun time! All proceeds from your purchase help support IRE and its mission.

Welcome to the conference! IRE staff will highlight key sessions and events that you won't want to miss while in Louisville. We'll also give you a brief rundown on some of the resources IRE has to offer.

Learn how to create beautiful, interactive data visualizations on short deadlines. No programming required. You'll learn everything you need to build data visualizations and publish them to your website just like a video. We'll teach you how to:

*Connect to Excel files and other data

*Create maps and charts

*Format them beautifully

*Make them interactive

Tableau Public is a free tool for journalists. No previous experience with Tableau is necessary to take this class. Pre-registration is required for Tableau for Beginners, you must be registered for the conference to attend. Limited seating is available. Laptops will be provided.

This mini-bootcamp introduces Python as a general purpose tool for data wrangling and analysis. The daylong class will introduce language basics and useful libraries in the course of a typical data project: sraping data from the Web, inserting it in a database and analyzing the results. Attendees are expected to have a familiarity with databases and SQL. This class will take place all day Thursday. There is limited seating and an additional fee to attend.

NOTE: Registration is required for this session. Click here to sign up.

An introduction to Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' signature economics database, with easy directions for journalists to tap into it to add context to their stories related to the economy. FRED contains more than 60,000 frequently updated sets of data, ranging from consumer price indexes to regional (metropolitan statistical area) housing charts and unemployment rates. It allows users to automatically compare the data over varying periods of time in customizable charts, and then easily incorporate those charts into print or web publications.

As journalists, we're accustomed to approaching new data with questions already in mind. This panel is about the opposite approach: using tools and techniques to help data reveal new story ideas to you. We'll talk about the value of exploratory data analysis and walk through an example of how it can help us spot trends and outliers in a new, unfamiliar dataset.

You'll learn intermediate to advanced R and get an understanding of the techniques and methodologies of data science that you can bring back to your newsroom and impact your work right away. You'll need a good foundation in stats. Before the class we'll provide videos and exercises that cover the basics of R so we can hit the ground running.

Participants are expected to have experience with a programming language, an understanding of statistics up to linear regression and a solid foundation of work in spreadsheets, database managers, data cleaning etc.

Preregistration is required for this session. Only 24 seats are available and there is an additional $70 registration fee. Preregistration are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Prospective attendees must register and fill out an application for this day-long track. This session is full.

If your application is not accpeted to the training, your registration fee for this track will be reimbursed. Sign-up is on the main conference registration form.

Are you new to data journalism or does this happen to be your first time at a CAR conference? If so, this session will help you get on track to make sure that you get the best experience possible from the 2013 CAR Conference. We'll highlight sessions and give you tips for success during and after the conference.

For an infographics reporter, crossing the digital divide can be like crossing the desert: you start from a green fertile place where your tools are familiar and your work is an articulate representation of your ideas, but you quickly find yourself struggling to make basic charts in an strange and unforgiving interactive landscape. If you put in the time, you can work as well online as you do in print. But how do you get from Illustrator and Excel to Javascript, D3 and Raphael? And how do you build those skills in the course of your normal workdays and deadlines?

Join us for a discussion on print and interactive design and the endless pursuit of multi-platform mastery.

Primarily for those new to Caspio, this class introduces attendees to the Caspio Bridge framework for rapid database publishing. Learn how to publish databases as interactive, searchable, and embeddable web interfaces in minutes instead of hours. Topics covered:

*Prepping and importing data

*Creating a searchable database

*Report interfaces and layouts

*Deployment on your website

*Common customizations

Pre-registration is required and space is limited. No programming skills or previous Caspio experience is necessary. Laptops will be provided.

Governments at all levels spend a lot of money. And politicians often talk about eliminating waste and fraud. In this session you will hear how journalists used data to "follow the money" to see whether it is being spent well. You'll get tips and sources for doing your own data-driven "waste" investigations.

FOIA Machine aids journalists and citizens in accessing important government documents around the world that are covered by freedom of information laws. Speakers will demonstrate how journalists can use the platform in regular work and make the FOIA process more successful and organized.

FOIA Machine is a new opensource web platform for preparing and managing FOI requests at all government levels. It helps users navigate FOI laws by automating submissions, creating requests in the proper format, making documents publicly available on the web, and using the web to rally support when governments are unresponsive.

Journalists have created some amazing tools that get data, documents and other vital information to their audiences, but in many cases we haven't figured out how to make them sustainable. We'll examine the problem and talk about how to begin trying to solve it.

These three sessions will show how to take a data driven story from start to finish and includes long time practitioners as speakers. Using a specific U.S. federal database, the team of journalists will cover how to check a database for its flaws and omissions, analyze it and find stories out of it, add reporting and precision editing for the stories, and work to visualize the information and data not only for presentation, but also to elicit more tips and ideas from the public.

Journalists use DocumentCloud to turn documents into data, but did you know you can interact with your documents through DocumentCloud's API? We'll show you how other journalists use DocumentCloud's API and demonstrate how you too can update or access your documents' data with some rudimentary scripting.

The Web is full of useful tricks and applications to help you do your job faster and better. Learn how free online tools can boost your journalism and set you apart from the pack. We'll show you some simple tools that will allow you to tell stories visually and more.

This talk will cover how to use Excel Interactive View and Excel embedding to make your articles shine, keep people engaged with your site, with minimal effort and for free. The talk will also be showing off some of the latest features of Excel 2013 that make data analysis a snap.

Mobile and responsive web design are changing the way stories are told. Complicated data visualizations, which used to be planned for the desktop, now need to be planned so they can work for mobile, tablets, and desktops. Different devices mean different user-experiences for visualizations, which changes how information is consumed. We'll show some samples of successful and not-so successful data visualizations on a responsively-designed news site. We'll talk about workflow, best practices and user-interface patterns that set you up for success.

These three sessions will show how to take a data driven story from start to finish and includes long-time practitioners as speakers. Using a specific U.S. federal database the team of journalists will cover how to check a database for its flaws and omissions, analyze it and find stories out of it, add reporting and precision editing for the stories, and work to visualize the information and data not only for presentation, but also to elicit more tips and ideas from the public.

Learn new tricks and tactics with social media for backgrounding people and companies, finding experts and other sources, and using the latest geo-location tools for breaking news coverage. You'll discover new ways of using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and mobile apps for reporting that give you a leg up on the competition.

Take your data visualization skills to the next level. In this class we'll push Tableau's capabilities further to create more complex visualizations. You'll learn how to:

*Clean and format dirty data

*Use multiple data sources in the same visualization

*Build more advanced visualizations

*Employ advanced interactive elements

Tableau Public is a free tool for journalists. Class participants should have some experience with Tableau or have taken the morning beginner course. Pre-registration is required for Tableau for Pros, you must be registered for the conference to attend. Limited seating is available. Laptops will be provided.

These three sessions will show how to take a data driven story from start to finish and includes long-time practitioners as speakers. Using a specific U.S. federal database, the team of journalists will cover how to check a database for its flaws and omissions, analyze it and find stories out of it, add reporting and precision editing for the stories, and work to visualize the information and data not only for presentation, but also to elicit more tips and ideas from the public.

The NICAR community has pioneered a path through the wilderness between journalism and technology. But having built a community and civilized the wilderness, it's worth talking how we continue to improve our skills as well as paving the path for others.

Both Hacks/Hackers and OpenNews are engaged in this endeavor, and it would be interesting to talk with Burt and Dan about what they think is important in this process.

Review methods for importing web data into the Google Docs platform. Learn to fetch external web data, create scripts to schedule fetches in batches and process the data. No programming skills required. Those familiar with the Microsoft Excel application will be familiar with many of the concepts. Experienced programmers can learn to develop web application proofs of concept, prototyping and fetching through API.

Machine learning and predictive modeling are some of the hottest skills in Silicon Valley. In this panel, we'll teach you how to apply them in the newsroom. Includes examples from real-world projects, including building intelligent regular expressions with maximum entropy models; using Bayesian classifiers to filter documents; and linear and logistic regression.

Open government initiatives have done little to open government up to scrutiny, and officials are becoming more restrictive than ever. How can journalists fight back against unnecessary secrecy and data redactions? A data journalist, the curator of open data in Missouri and a public records attorney will discuss the troubling trends and ways they can be overcome.

Do others ask you to teach them about Fusion Tables? Then we want you here! Get savvy with the new version of Fusion Tables, and get all your questions answered. This is the recharge event for those who are already experts. Learn how to present two beginner courses and an intermediate course on Fusion Tables. We'll cover the newest features and share tips & tricks for smooth trainings. You'll leave with teaching materials and an invitation to Google Fusion Tables' trainers community for follow-up advice and insights after CAR.

Bring your experiences, questions, and your laptop if you have one. Plan to join in for dinner afterwards too!

Learn the basic concepts of network analysis and discover ways it can be used in reporting. Topics will include gathering structured data on relationships, analyzing that data and visualizing the connections between people and organizations.

The Census Bureau serves as the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy. Media outlets often use this data to support their news stories and articles. The American FactFinder (AFF) provides access to this data which is compiled from several censuses and surveys. This session will demonstrate how to use the tool and the improvements that are being made to make this data tool better and more user-friendly.

Join your fellow CAR colleagues Thursday at Sports and Social Club for a night of competitive bowling and see which team wins the night's best score. Beginning at 6:30 p.m., you can grab a drink and socialize or form a team and bowl.

Tickets for the event are $30 per person and include: (2) complimentary drink tickets and 2 hours of bowling, including shoes. Drink tickets can be used to purchase well drinks, domestic and imported beer, house wine and soda. A full dinner menu will be available.

This is a great opportunity to get out and socialize with fellow journalists, have fun and show your competitive spirit.

Stop by the IRE sales table and take a look at our merchandise. We will be selling books, including the newest title in the IRE beat book series. The large selection of titles we carry will certainly include your interests. The winners of the IRE T-shirt contest will be displayed and on sale. The sales table is also the place to get your ticket to "A Night on the Town" an event that is sure to be a fun time! All proceeds from your purchase help support IRE and its mission.

The academic bloggers behind FloatingSheep.org offer an overview of DOLLY: an online platform for easily exploring and visualizing the local aspect of geographic 'big' data like Twitter. We will walk through the functionality of the app as well as a number of practical examples of how DOLLY can be used to explore news events. We are still working through how we could make this academic resource more widely available and interested in working with a few members of the IRE community to apply DOLLY's potential to journalism.

This mini-boot camp will walk you through the process of taking a dataset from raw data and turning it into a searchable online database using the Python language and the Django Web framework. Only 18 seats are available and there is an additional $70 registration fee. Pre-registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Prospective attendees must register and fill out an application for this hands-on camp. This session is full. If your application is not accepted to the training, your registration fee will be reimbursed. Sign-up is on the main conference registration form. These classes will take place Friday and Saturday morning.

Here's a shocker: Data are not perfect. Learn what integrity checks you do on every data set and what to do about problems you find. Because you will. In this class you'll learn to tackle issues with Excel and notepad. Prerequisite: Some familiarity with Excel.

So much data comes to us in .pdf form or, worse, on paper that we then need to scan. We'll offer tips, tricks and best practices to quickly crack open those dastardly files and get the data in a usable format. We'll look at some of classic methods of breaking down PDFs and we'll introduce a tool that uses XML to splice PDFs and turn them into CSVs.

Are you tired of standing on the sidelines while everyone else has all the fun with database queries? Tired of hoping that Access is doing what you think it's doing when you point and click? Wouldn't you rather just tell your database manager what slice of the data you want? Join us for a hassle free entry to the world of SQL, (Structured Query Language), the lingua franca of relational databases. It's surprisingly simple and surprisingly powerful -- and it works in just about any database you can name.

Are you perplexed, confused and bamboozled by data science? Do you feel disappointed to be a journalist and not a mighty data scientist, conqueror of databases and slayer of statistics? Do you worry about drowning in the data deluge, or falling into a data mine? Fear no more, because if you attend this session you'll learn what data science is (or at least my take on the term), what the high-level tools data scientists apply to their problems, and what skills data scientists need to learn from journalists. You don't need to know anything about data science to enjoy this session, but if you do, you will leave with some thoughts provoked.

This session is open to all attendees and does not require pre-registration to Thursday's NewsCamp hands-on training.

We'll introduce our project to create the first comprehensive, standardized set of federal election data. This will include a demo of how to access data from the project, and how potential contributors can get involved.

If you've got the time but don't have the money, this session is for you. Data cleaning, mapping, charts and more - we've got 30+ free/cheap tools for data visualization and analysis. Point and clickers and coders alike will enjoy this opportunity to reacquaint themselves with the ever-evolving toolbox of the digital journalist.

Learn how to wield powerful (and free) text editors in your quest for clean, useable data. We'll cover some of the text editors available for different operating systems and the basic tasks they can accomplish.

Get up and get down with our panel to go home with a game plan to find out if your local public safety departments are arriving. We'll break down all the jargon and provide a shake-and-bake recipe for analyzing 911 response times at any American fire department or EMS shop.

This session will show you various tools that anyone can use to communicate securely in today's world, including (but not limited to) covert phone calls, disposable email addresses, and hidden web surfing. We'll also go over a few situations where this could be useful for you, the journalist -- reaching out to sources without revealing yourself too much, providing avenues for whistleblowers to contact you and other situations.

Learn how to make the most of the Find and Replace functions in text editors to clean up messy text files. We'll show you some tools (such as basic regular expressions) to help you find problems and whip your data into shape.

Death to tediously hand-crafted flat files! This killer combo offers a way to suck structured data out of Google Spreadsheets and plug it into whatever program/platform/framework you'd like, via simple javascript syntax. Ergo, the data is easily shared with every reporter, editor, fact-checker, copy editor, etc. in your newsroom, and all updates are real time.

Kickstart your data skills with IRE's mini boot camp. This series of hands-on classes will introduce you to spreadsheets and databases with IRE's proven techniques. IRE's current and past trainers will walk you through sorting, calculating and interviewing data. You'll come away with a solid base for using data analysis in your own newsroom. In addition, we'll provide you with our boot camp materials to help keep you on track long after you leave the conference. Only 36 seats are available and there is an additional $50 registration fee. Pre-registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Registration can be done online when you register for the conference. Sessions will be held Friday and Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Kickstart your data skills with IRE's mini boot camp. This series of hands-on classes will introduce you to spreadsheets and databases with IRE's proven techniques. IRE's current and past trainers will walk you through sorting, calculating and interviewing data. You'll come away with a solid base for using data analysis in your own newsroom. In addition, we'll provide you with our boot camp materials to help keep you on track long after you leave the conference.

Learn how professionals combined old and new techniques when covering events from Election Day to Hurricane Sandy. We'll talk in detail about the elements and some of the code. But you needn't be a programmer to participate. We hope to help you consider a few new ideas and approaches next time you need to move fast.

Hitting a wall with Access when it comes to big data? It may be time to make the leap to the world's most popular (and free) database manager. This session will fill you in on everything you need to know.

Esri experts offer a 50-minute workshop to provide insight into how the company's new ArcGIS Online product can be maximized as a platform to enhance storytelling. Esri Story Maps and other app development tools that require no programming expertise are now available to make digital and print map generation more effective and easier to create.

When it comes to visualizing data, you know you want to be nimble in something. But what should that something be? A look - with examples - at some of the trade-offs between using a tool like Tableau versus a programming approach like D3.

Or, how to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This session is an advanced class on hosting very high-volume news apps using Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Think election night, the thundering herd, the million horde, etc. We'll cover Varnish and CloudFront caching, static file bake-out using S3, and go over what's likely to break and how to be ready for it. Prerequisites: Familiarity with Amazon EC2 and the linux command line.

The folks behind some of the most exciting projects bringing together CAR reporting and news app development will talk about how they do it and what they've learned. How do CAR reporting skills relate to app development? What insights and techniques can developers bring to investigations? How do we create workflows that produce the best of both worlds -- great apps and great stories from the same data sets? How can we further integrate interactivity and narrative for more engaging storytelling approaches? Think Phil Meyer meets Edward Tufte in these tales from the trenches.

Tame that stack of documents! In this workshop we'll walk you through the analysis of a large set of text documents (thousands of pages) using two free tools: DocumentCloud and Overview. You'll learn how to upload, OCR, search, visualize, cluster, tag, annotate, and publish your documents.

Learn to take filthy, stinking, messy data from an unhelpful government agency and transform it into something useful with the help of OpenRefine. If you often have to scrub and standardize huge spreadsheets, but you haven't delved into regular expressions, this program will change your life.

Cloud servers are an amazingly flexible way to use computing resources. Servers and test benches used to take weeks to order and configure, but thanks to the cloud, you can build up arbitrarily complex farms of computers to do your bidding in a few minutes, from serving a dynamic news app to crunching through a data set to trying out a new technology on the cheap. This course will help you understand the thicket of acronyms and programs that make up Amazon's AWS system and will get you started building servers.

All you need is a normal Amazon account. Before the class, go to http://aws.amazon.com/ and click "sign up," and follow the instructions so you've got an account ready. Important note: We'll build actual servers and then turn them off, which may cost a few dollars.

As a competitive-intelligence professional, I use Google and a wide variety of other Web-based tools to find very specific pieces of information, answer critical questions, and dig out hard to find information on companies. Business journalists can use many of these same techniques to go beyond Google and get much more out of the Web in far less time when researching companies and individuals around the globe. In this session, you'll fill your toolbox with Web tools for your research.

Have a pile of documents, reports, index cards, or other collection of items not easily analyzed? Bring them in, and we'll talk strategies and best practices for building your own database by hand (gasp).

Conflicted about whether to attend Lightning Talks or brush up on your Excel skills (and maybe get a solid data-driven story idea you can take back to your newsroom)? Why not do both? This class will focus on basic Excel skills to show you how to interview your data. The instructor will come prepared not only with Census population estimates and campaign-finance data, but also extreme weather data that includes, yes, lightning strikes. We'll start with whatever data appeals to the most students and learn all we can. Got data of your own that you're not sure how to approach or need help with something specific? Bring it with you, and we'll help you figure it out.

You don't need a fancy pants program to compute several different sorts of statistics. In this session, you'll learn how to compute basic descriptive statistics in Excel. You'll also learn how to run correlations and regressions in Excel.

Do you listen to programmers talk and zone out? Instead of letting your mind wander to your dinner plans, come to this session to learn the basics of how programmers think, the tools they use, and how others have applied the world of computer science to journalism. This session assumes no prior knowledge of CAR.

Identifying people who appear in two databases can give an investigation sweep and take it to the next level: think about matching camp operators and sex offenders, or felons and almost anything. But such joins are difficult and time-consuming, particularly if you have names but not dates of birth. Learn techniques to sidestep those issues by combining your favorite database software with simple scripting and some old-fashioned reporting. By the end of the session, you'll know how to match messy addresses and how to highlight promising hits based on name alone -- exactly what you need to find some bad guys and beef-up your next project.

Sometimes you don't need 45 minutes to explain a useful technique or interesting resource. Join your colleagues for a session of short (5-minute) talks about doing CAR, Web development or other related topics. Anyone can suggest an idea, and the most popular talks will be given at this session. We'll provide a computer with Internet access and a projector, and the rest is up to you.

*5 algorithms in 5 minutes - Chase Davis

*Showing big datasets on small screens - Katie Park

*Django Retrained: Five ways coding like a Web developer can make you a better investigative reporter - Ben Welsh

Join fellow CAR attendees for the presentation of the Philip Meyer Journalism Awards at a reception Friday night with light hor d' oeuvres and a cash bar beginning at 5:15 p.m. in Regency North. Thanks to Northwestern University Knight Lab for sponsoring the first drink for all attendees that evening.

Stop by the IRE sales table and take a look at our merchandise. We will be selling books, including the newest title in the IRE beat book series. The large selection of titles we carry will certainly include your interests. The winners of the IRE T-shirt contest will be displayed and on sale. The sales table is also the place to get your ticket to "A Night on the Town" an event that is sure to be a fun time! All proceeds from your purchase help support IRE and its mission.

Statisticians need to really understand their data (and so do you!) before they begin running analyses. As a result, statistical software packages such as SPSS have many powerful tools to summarize your data. You're going to love them. We'll take a look at the structure of some Home Mortgage data, do data transformations and run crosstabs with Chi Square significance tests to look at racial discrimination in home lending. Familiarity with Excel and some database software is recommended because we've got a *lot* of ground to cover in this hour.

Income inequality zoomed into the headlines with the Occupy movement and the 2012 presidential campaign, but most coverage was more about heat than light. Talk of an "income gap" "or the 99%" obscures a complicated reality and ignores most of the story - trends in the middle class. Income inequality is growing in many places, shrinking in others. Its pace and texture vary. Some causes are global and national, some are local. Come learn better ways to cover a complex story, including how journalists did recent stories and data tools you can use to analyze local trends.

Welcome to Google Fusion Tables. In this hands-on introduction to the free online tool you’ll learn how to import data and turn it into an online map easily. We’ll add in some simple customization as well. Experience with spreadsheets and a Google account are the only prerequisites for this class.

*Moderated by Rich Gordon, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

A growing community of journalism developers is regularly producing technology that is potentially of broad utility beyond a single use. Much of this technology, however, is never used by anyone beyond the developer or news organization that created it. We'd all like our technology to be more widely used. What are the right strategies to promote the wider adoption of innovative news and media technologies? For what kinds of applications are open-source the right way to achieve widespread adoption?And when would it be worth considering turning the technology into a commercial product?

How can the tools and techniques used in data journalism be applied to the day-to-day demands of beat reporting? What challenges do newsrooms face reorganizing and adding structure to beats? We'll share our experiences building sites like Homicide Watch DC and PolitiFact, and look at examples of other projects that add structure and data to daily beat reporting.

This panel will identify areas for data journalism exploration by examining the current state-of-the-art baseball data analysis. Sports are the original form of data journalism -- box scores predate open government movements by about a century. And Joseph Adler's "Baseball Hacks" trained newbie Web CAR reporters how to scrape and analyze data sets using Perl and MySQL. Finally, sports analytics are a leading indicator for other kinds of analysis. Sensors, economic analysis, leverage are all de rigeur in baseball but still up-and-coming in data journalism. We'll take the concepts being used to analyze baseball, football, soccer and apply them to standard data journalism chores. A good example of this is leverage -- in baseball, an analyst attempts to find those situations in which a player had the greatest opportunity to change the outcome of a game. In data journalism, we might use a similar tool to analyze critical paths to an election win for a candidate or put together a network graph for bundled contributions to PACs.

Dispatch is a unique publishing tool that allows journalists working in conflict areas to publish their work and communicate with sources instantly and securely. Using a unique, identity-based encryption scheme, Dispatch helps separate your published work from your real identity, while still giving your readers confidence that the material you post really came from you. And, while it publishes to the internet, Dispatch helps make sure your work gets out even when the internet is down, through direct, device-to-device sharing that publishes to the web as soon as connectivity is restored.

In this session, we'll introduce the technologies and principles that drive Dispatch, and in the process highlight the issues that reporters all over the world need to be aware of when working with networked technologies. Participants will also be able to download and use the app themselves, and offer feedback on its functionality and design.

Amaze your editors and wow your readers with these quick-hit data story ideas. Learn techniques on how to look for the short-form watchdog and how to juggle it all. Afflict the comfortable by fact-checking their statements, find expert sources and use spreadsheets to inform your next project.

Google Fusion Tables is known for its easy-to-use mapping interface, but it's also a powerful and free database manager for reporters who don't have access to software or haven't yet mastered SQL syntax. Learn to use Fusion Tables to aggregate and query your data - and explore new features that have recently extended the tool's capabilities.

Getting any record can be tough, but wrangling data can introduce even more challenges. We'll give you some tools and tips for getting data out of government agencies, no matter how difficult, and whether or not it's digitized. We'll look at how bureaucracies and a dearth of data can be surmounted by partnerships and clever programs to generate compelling services. And we'll look at case studies including the acquisition of data for a real-time traffic monitoring system in the Philippines.(interaksyon.com/tnav).

For newsrooms that need to cope with regularly-updated data, the ability to provide both real-time access and custom views to pinpoint newsworthy events is crucial. This panel will discuss some of the considerations when building and maintaining data dashboards, and show some examples of dashboards in action.

Linear regression helps you find relationships between two or more variables, but when an outcome has only two possibilities, you need a different tool. That, my friends, is where logistic regression comes in.

Business is all about numbers and data. In this session, you will get tips for finding and using data to beef up your stories about business and economics. No heavy lifting here, but it would be useful to have some experience with spreadsheets.

There's a lot to think about when it comes to news apps, but not all of it is coding. What story is it telling? Does it tell it consistently and in a fact-based way? Does the story it tells agree with the reporting (and if not who's got explaining to do!) What's the lede, what's the nut (yes, apps have those).

This session will step through a process for creating components for standards-based Web content, focusing in particular on the creation of common building blocks for data visualization in JavaScript. D3 is an increasingly popular choice for developing visual content and we will look at how items ranging from simple bar charts to custom graphics can be packaged up for easy reuse. Backbone is a widely used toolkit for creating browser-based applications and we will examine how its models and views can play a role in the creation of components. Consideration will be given to combination, customization and the power of reuse versus the perils of over-generalization.

Prerequisites:The session will appeal most to people who're already doing a bit of JavaScript programming. A familiarity with OOP and MVC concepts is a plus (but not essential).

When you're working on a web project, do you end up with a folder full of files with names like index_draft1.html, index_draft2.html, index_draft3.html? How often have you added a bad piece of code to a script, only to realize you didn't save a copy of the version that worked yesterday?

You need version control, and git is the answer. This class will introduce basic git commands and walk you through using the social coding site Github to store and organize your projects. It's ideal for anyone working on web development, scraping and scripting to gather or clean data. You should set up an account on Github before the class, and it's recommended, but not compulsory, that you be comfortable navigating the command line.

Labor unions may be struggling to maintain their membership, but they still play a pivotal role in the nation's economy and politics. Public pensions and the increasing pressure they are putting on local and state finances have moved to the forefront of the nation's fiscal debate. Tom and Mary Jo will discuss the data you can use to dissect the unions and public pensions in your region.

Helium Scraper is a reasonably low-cost ($140) solution for a lot of scraping chores, even if it’s not the magic bullet. This demonstration will show you when it might work for your project and give examples of how it works.

We web developers strive for rugged independence. The luckiest of us have total control over our web stacks and the design of our projects, unlike those poor sods forced to labor within the Content Management System (CMS). Therein lies the problem; being apart means being invisible unless you spread your content to the CMS and beyond. This panel will discuss some strategies and experiences for getting your app content to find readers where they are.

We'll cover common assumptions and mistakes in data-driven stories, from misunderstanding data to writing bad SQL. Learn techniques for checking your work and creating a safety net to help you sleep at night.

Kickstart your data skills with IRE's mini boot camp. This series of hands-on classes will introduce you to spreadsheets and databases with IRE's proven techniques. IRE's current and past trainers will walk you through sorting, calculating and interviewing data. You'll come away with a solid base for using data analysis in your own newsroom. In addition, we'll provide you with our boot camp materials to help keep you on track long after you leave the conference.

Using R, we will make 117 drought maps that appeared in the New York Times last summer, and explore other representations of the same data. In doing so, we will hopefully learn why we might (or might not) want to 'sketch with data' in R.

Prerequisites: A text editor doesn't scare you. Or, if it does, you're game for learning.

This three-part class is designed for data journalists who are comfortable with the basic tools of our craft but intimidated by the "p-word" and think Aron Pilhofer has signed a pact with the devil. We will cover the basics and show you how a little programming can save you hours or days of time and make you look like a genius to your boss. Requirements: a laptop, a Google sign-in and curiosity.

This section of the training: Learn how to manipulate your maps with some easy Python and HTML.

Kickstart your data skills with IRE's mini boot camp. This series of hands-on classes will introduce you to spreadsheets and databases with IRE's proven techniques. IRE's current and past trainers will walk you through sorting, calculating and interviewing data. You'll come away with a solid base for using data analysis in your own newsroom. In addition, we'll provide you with our boot camp materials to help keep you on track long after you leave the conference.

Data is not just for analyzing, sorting and filtering. We'll share the best databases for finding sources, uncovering contact information, investigating relationships -- and how to get them. Great for beginners or anyone who wants to see spreadsheets in a new light.

Wouldn't it be sweet if you got an email when something newsworthy happens? Wouldn't that make your job easier? Well, have we got news for you. Learn about implementing PANDA in your newsroom and automating your data chores.

This three-part class is designed for data journalists who are comfortable with the basic tools of our craft but intimidated by the "p-word" and think Aron Pilhofer has signed a pact with the devil. We will cover the basics and show you how a little programming can save you hours or days of time and make you look like a genius to your boss. Requirements: a laptop, a Google sign-in and curiosity.

In this second of three classes, you’ll learn how to open a text file, clean it and load it into a database.

Don't forget fun when making your interactives! We'll showcase witty and offbeat interactive graphics and news games from a few outlets we love, with the inside scoop on how each graphic was created, how the ideas got greenlighted, and tools you'd need to make them yourself.

Learn about datasets that can help localize health stories, including pharmaceutical company spending on doctors, nursing home violations and hospital quality, among others. We will dive into Medicare data and data that local and state reporters can use.

Displaying a series of events can be as simple as drawing a straight line. But if you want to get fancier, there are a bunch of other options to display chronologies and storylines. In this talk, we'll take a tour of current timelines in the wild and walk you through three open-source tools to help you make your own: ProPublica's TimelineSetter, Zach Wise's TimelineJS, and WNYC's Vertical Timeline.

The Center for Investigative Reporting and IRE teamed up with the San Francisco data science company Kaggle to help bridge the gap in journalism between hacking, math and substantive expertise. They challenged data scientists to approach a database journalists have looked at a million times over: federal campaign contributions. We'll introduce you to the winner of the competition and discuss the tools the data scientists used and their results.

This three-part class is designed for data journalists who are comfortable with the basic tools of our craft but intimidated by the "p-word" and think Aron Pilhofer has signed a pact with the devil. We will cover the basics and show you how a little programming can save you hours or days of time and make you look like a genius to your boss. Requirements: a laptop, a Google sign-in and curiosity.

This class will cover how to use Python to tame data for your own fiendish ends.

Want to get good stories, build trust with readers and make it harder for powerful interests to avoid scrutiny? Come by and pick up the essential tools of computer-assisted reporting -- and learn how to turn data into powerful storytelling. Whether you’re more comfortable with spreadsheets or shoeleather reporting, we’ll walk you through success stories (and cautionary tales) to beef up the impact of your beat.

Lots of people use Google Docs. But many of them don't know about the Google Apps Script language, which makes it possible to scrape data from across the web and from Google's geography, finance, machine learning and other APIs, then present and analyze the data in a Google Spreadsheet. This session will demonstrate the basics of Apps Script by building a spreadsheet that automatically imports new data from a public source every morning and sends an email when it comes across something interesting.

Panelists will show what data journalism is like outside the United States. There are different trends, and one of them is new independent centers for investigative reporting and cross-border investigations. Crowdsourcing is another trend, together with interactivity and different ways of mapping the news. We’re also witnessing the growing power of classical journalistic skills in combination with computer-assisted reporting.

NodeXL is an add-in for Excel 2007 and 2010 that allows you to do network analysis (aka social network analysis) in a familiar spreadsheet environment. You'll learn how to use the software by turning data from 2007 on voting patterns in the US Senate into an informative graphic revealing the chamber's underlying dynamics - and highlighting the few senators who broke the partisan mold.

Stop by the IRE sales table and take a look at our merchandise. We will be selling books, including the newest title in the IRE beat book series. The large selection of titles we carry will certainly include your interests. The winners of the IRE T-shirt contest will be displayed and on sale. The sales table is also the place to get your ticket to "A Night on the Town" an event that is sure to be a fun time! All proceeds from your purchase help support IRE and its mission.

Kickstart your data skills with IRE's mini boot camp. This series of hands-on classes will introduce you to spreadsheets and databases with IRE's proven techniques. IRE's current and past trainers will walk you through sorting, calculating and interviewing data. You'll come away with a solid base for using data analysis in your own newsroom. In addition, we'll provide you with our boot camp materials to help keep you on track long after you leave the conference.

Welcome to Google Fusion Tables. In this hands-on introduction to the free online tool you'll learn how to import data and turn it into an online map easily. We'll add in some simple customization as well. Experience with spreadsheets and a Google account are the only prerequisites for this class.

Applications such as QGIS and Google Fusion Tables have made digital mapping accessible to anyone. But are we building maps that are useful? This panel will explore design dos and don'ts and discuss ways to optimize your maps so they perform well for your audiences.

Wondering what you need to learn to take that next step in your career? Interested in which skills news organizations are prioritizing now, and what might set you up for what they'll want next? Drop by the roundtable join us for a discussion of the skills that will help you progress.

There are plenty of clues on the Web that data exist, even though so much information is buried deep beyond search engine eyes. This session will highlight advanced searches and strategies for finding data that can't be found with a traditional search engine. We'll also point you to the best sites for tracking down local, national and international data. All you need is a browser and some curiosity.

Harkening back to an earlier era of computing, the command line can easily seem like magic. Incantations are learned by rote, passed on by word of mouth from user to user, or written into arcane and impenetrable documentation. But live in fear no more! We will illuminate its nature and bind it to our use, navigating computers, manipulating files, and opening a comprehensible gateway to a world of pro-user and developer tools. Attendees should bring their laptops and be prepared to discover the Linux or Mac command line. (Note: Windows users may also learn transferable skills)